Feel free to send suggestions for potential books (we are looking for some ideas in the non-fiction genre).

For those that have or are searching for a hard copy of any of these books, please let me know and we can try to connect members for a brief exchange.

October

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Won the Pulitzer Prize 2015

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.November

Hopscotch: A Novel by Julio Cortazar

Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves “the Club.” A child’s death and La Maga’s disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira’s astonishing adventures.

December

My Struggle: Book One introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues–death, love, art, fear–and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

Welcome to BAIN!

BAIN aims to help expatriates settle into the Buenos Aires lifestyle, to provide an understanding of the Buenos Aires culture and to offer a forum where expatriates can share knowledge and experiences. We are so glad you have found our site and hope that we can provide you with useful information. Please check out the new members page for more information on how to join.